Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
A moralist in the newsroom
Avec Camus, by Jean Daniel, Gallimard, 158 pp, €9.50, ISBN: 2070781933 In August 1944, as General Dietrich von Choltitz defied Hitler’s orders to burn Paris and surrendered the city to Free French and Resistance commanders, two journalists and former résistants, one in his thirty-first year, the other just turned forty-one, were among a small group who took possession…
An All-Seeing Eye
Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea, by Garrett Cormican, Whyte’s, 337pp (illustrated), €60.00, ISBN: 978-0950641539 Camille Souter has been painting for over 50 years. When she embarked on her career the dominant mode of practice in Ireland was characterised by the academicism of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), which preoccupied itself with landscape, portraiture and…
Meet the Neighbours
Europe East and West, by Norman Davies, Jonathan Cape, 352 pp, £20.00, ISBN: 978-0224069243 In 1994, in Vrhpolje in western Slovenia, some twenty-five kilometres from the Italian border, there was a rather unusual public event. On a rock just outside the village, local people erected a monument, remembering a battle that took place 1,600 years ago…
Thoughts from the Top Table
Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006, by Gore Vidal, Little, Brown, £17.99, 288 pp, ISBN: 978-0316027274 There is an old joke about a man – Murphy is as good a name as any other – whose continual name-dropping and bragging about his intimacy with the great, the good and the famous so exasperates…
Sucked Into The Tube
A Great Feast of Light: Growing up Irish in the Television Age, by John Doyle, Aurum Press, 320 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1845131951 The entertainment technology in my house in the 1950s was fairly limited. There was an old radiogram in the sitting room that used to play 78s. It worked when I was a small child…
Never Say Die
Everyman, by Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, 192 pp, £10, ISBN: 0224078690 Philip Roth once claimed, in his collection of reflective and self-evaluating essays Reading Myself and Others (1975), that his critics saw him as an “irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious” writer, bereft of morals and seeking merely to outrage and shock ‑ a Howard Stern of the literary scene….
Angel of the North
In the 1970s, the young Christopher Robbins was admitted into the world of octogenarian film producer Brian Desmond Hurst, an unusual place, made up of eccentric neighbours, theatre folk, young men of religious convictions, aristocrats, policemen, blackmailers, sly procurers, feral…
Man of Constant Sorrow
Brian Lynch’s subtle first novel, The Winner of Sorrow, is based on the life of William Cowper, a hugely acclaimed poet in late eighteenth century England whose work has gone into neglect in the last hundred years.
Among the Believers
The War for Muslim Minds, by Gilles Kepel, Harvard University Press, £10.95, ISBN: 067401992X In February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, returning from the Yalta conference where he, Churchill and Stalin had signed off on their agreement on the shape of post-war Europe, stopped off in the Middle East for another meeting which was to have…
A Sentimental Dissenter
Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent, by Tom Paulin, Faber, 360 pp, £20, ISBN: 0571221157 While bare biographical facts offer no guaranteed entry into the core of a writer’s creative concerns, the circumstances of Tom Paulin’s upbringing situate him at an interesting cultural and historical intersection. Born in Leeds in 1949, he grew up in…
Righteous Renegade
Arrow in the Blue, by Arthur Koestler, Vintage, 416 pp, £9.99, ISBN: 0099490676 The Invisible Writing, by Arthur Koestler, Vintage, 528 pp, £9.99, ISBN: 0099490684 Darkness At Noon, by Arthur Koestler, Vintage, 224 pp, £6.99, ISBN: 0099424916 L’Homme Sans Concessions: Arthur Koestler et son siècle, by Michel Laval, Calmann-Lévy, 706 pp, €25, ISBN: 2702135668 On…
The Politics of Assimilation
Recently published books referred to in this article: Evangelicals and Catholics in 19th century Ireland, James H Murphy editor, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, ISBN: 1851829172 Grattan’s Failure, Danny Mansergh, Irish Academic Press, Dublin 2005, ISBN: 0716528150 The Bible War in Ireland, Irene Whelan, Lilliput Press, Dublin 2005, ISBN: 1843510049 The Church Of Ireland in…